


People Populate the Darkness

by Blacktablet (Ishamaeli)



Series: People Populate the Darkness (A Sherlock/American Gods Crossover) [2]
Category: American Gods - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Kink Meme, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-22
Updated: 2012-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-29 22:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/324754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ishamaeli/pseuds/Blacktablet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Shadow and Mr Nancy started comparing scars after their fourth beers, and they goaded John into joining them.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	People Populate the Darkness

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers to TGG (Sherlock 1x03) and major spoilers to American Gods. Thanks go to jacknjill270 who both fixed my grammar and made several helpful suggestions regarding the content of the fic, which ultimately made this a better story.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** Sherlock and John in their current incarnation belong to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and BBC. American Gods belongs to Neil Gaiman. The quote at the end is from the book, and the title from the quote.

I

“Some old friends are coming to visit,” said Sherlock one day in late October, when they had both healed and John could go swimming again if he wanted to without having a panic attack at the sight of a pool. The dark-haired god sounded decisive, grim, as if he had pondered every possible option that he had and noted always coming back to the same choice.

John sat on the sofa, currently in the middle of updating his blog and unsuccessfully trying to put their latest case into words. The frustrated huffs he made from time to time betrayed the fact that he was trying – and failing – to put together a timeline for it.

“We’ll pick them up at the airport on Saturday,” continued Sherlock. “I told Mycroft to send a car.”

“Oh?” John glanced up from the glowing screen and resumed typing for a moment until his brain caught up with his ears. He slowly closed the lid of his laptop, the sound of it clicking shut jarring in the sudden quiet of their living room where you otherwise could have heard a needle drop.

Sherlock was frowning at the window, dressed in a sharp black suit. His gaze was directed outside and for once, he was not tapping his foot in annoyance or fidgeting but stood perfectly still with his hands clasped together behind his back.

“Your sort of friends,” clarified John.

It was not a question, so naturally Sherlock did not answer.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing much,” Sherlock told him. His attention was fully focused on the rain clouds moving in from the east, dark grey and heavy with condensed water. “Not yet.”

John shivered.

 

II

The clouds that had steadily gathered over the city waited courteously until Saturday morning to release the heaps of water they appeared to have brought with them. A colony of black umbrellas swarmed the streets of London, making individual citizens vanish in the homogeneous mass like ants on the forest floor.

Two dark umbrellas waited beside a sleek black car near Heathrow.

Sherlock had insisted that their guests would find their way to the car without any guidance. John had argued that they had no way of knowing what the car looked like or where it was even parked, because according to Sherlock neither of them currently owned a phone and the last time he had heard from them was before they’d left America. One pointed look from the tall man had reminded John whom exactly he was talking about, and that made him shut up.

“Here they come,” announced Sherlock even though John was sure he had seen neither hide nor hair of the visitors.

The thrum of rain was constant; it drowned out all the little sounds that made up the usual cacophony of life. John watched the two strangers walk closer in watery silence. They appeared to flicker oddly; at first they were walking fifteen yards away, then thirteen, then suddenly ten. It was unnerving to watch.

When they finally stopped next to John and Sherlock, they seemed to solidify into two distinctive men. One of them was old and hunched over, his thin limbs wiry with age, long in reach. The skin of his face was wrinkled with years, almost dark enough to be literally black. Set against the bright yellow of his overcoat and the red of his umbrella, the man’s colouring looked even deeper. For some strange reason it reminded John of the impenetrable darkness that was the night in the tropic.

But the old man’s eyes were alert and curious. “I didn’t know you had a partner these days,” he barked as a greeting, addressing Sherlock. “A warrior, is he?”

His companion was taller than Sherlock by several inches but equally well dressed in a dark suit. He wore his brown hair in a buzz-cut and had an impressive physique, but for a large man he carried himself like someone who wanted to go unnoticed, not here to cause trouble, sir. His expression turned wary when he noticed John standing next to the detective.

“This is Shadow,” said Sherlock, and John noticed his lips said something else but could not quite make out what.

Shadow gripped his hand like a man who had had to teach himself how to shake hands with people without crushing their fingers. “Hi,” he greeted John, his rain-coloured eyes taking in the ex-soldier, measuring him. “I’ve heard about you. A lot.”

“Can’t say the same about you,” replied John clumsily, surprised that the other one had heard of him at all, let alone ‘a lot.’ “Nice to meet you.”

The old black man in the canary yellow coat snickered. “We’ll see about that.” He stuck out his hand and shook vigorously when John took it. The skin of his palm was rough but warm to touch. “Mr Nancy is the name, boy. Can you hold your liquor?”

John blinked, annoyance at being called ‘boy’ niggling in the back of his mind, never mind that the man was decades older than him. “Depends,” he said carefully. “Why?”

Mr Nancy grinned, teeth abnormally white against his dark skin. “Because tonight, boy, we’re going to drink and make merry.” He then took a good hard look at Sherlock and nodded approvingly. “You’ve filled out. I always feared that a fellow like you might keel over in a strong wind.”

“I trust you didn’t agree to come to make fun of me,” scoffed Sherlock. There was something steely in his eyes when he looked at Mr Nancy, something that dulled the pale green colour into hard, milky glass. “The car will take us to my place.”

“You mean ‘our’ place,” quipped Mr Nancy good-naturedly. “Yes, yes. Lead on then!”

They settled into their seats, facing each other in the back of the spacious vehicle. John felt unsettled. The air around him buzzed with a sort of nervous energy, making all the hair on his body stand on end. He relaxed only marginally when Sherlock briefly laid a hand on his arm.

“Sherlock here is a smart one,” remarked Mr Nancy unexpectedly, the rumbling of the car’s engine nearly drowning out his words. He shook excess water off the red umbrella outside, folded the guard neatly and pulled the thing back in before slamming the car door shut. A deafening silence descended. “Most of his lot, they’re too arrogant for their own good. They don’t know what they’ll be facing in a thousand years’ time when smart things like computers are ancient history and nobody has the faintest damn idea of what a car was.”

Sherlock snorted. “Most of my lot are idiots,” he said.

Mr Nancy laughed loudly at that.

 

III

It surprised John to see Sherlock take a bottle of red wine from somewhere and put it in the fridge to cool. His surprise did not lessen any when he saw Mr Nancy pull the exact same trick with a six-pack, never mind that he was not standing near anything to hide a case of beer in.

“Can’t have a party without a little something to broaden your mind,” winked the old man and refused to answer John’s question about whether the liquid in the bottles even was beer or something completely else.

At some point during the early evening, John expressed concern over their waking up Mrs Hudson with their ruckus. Sherlock tapped the side of his nose, said it had been taken care of and silenced Mr Nancy before he could finish the rather lewd anecdote about a tiger’s genitals that he had been telling.

“I asked him to find me a few slippery gods last year,” mentioned Mr Nancy instead, nodding his head at Sherlock. “Found them all, too, so I gave him an IOU.”

Shadow, John noticed, looked as bewildered as John felt. “You forgot to mention that to me,” the broad-shouldered man grunted, his forehead creasing with – worry? Confusion? Anger?

“I hear you won,” said Sherlock, ignoring him.

“I wonder if we did?” sighed Mr Nancy and rubbed at his eyes tiredly, a bottle of beer in one hand, yellow coat crumpled but still on. “They lost, that’s for sure.”

“Maybe that was enough,” John suggested. He thought about their last encounter with Moriarty, and how what had remained of the pool building had burned brightly in the night. The madman’s body had never been found. John was pretty sure he knew why.

“No,” interjected Shadow. “They’ll keep at it. But at least now it’s fair.”

 

IV

John asked Sherlock, “What kind of a god are you, exactly?” because they had never discussed that before, and Sherlock told him. He laughed so hard he nearly fell off his chair but couldn’t for the life of him remember Sherlock’s answer in the morning, which was just as well.

 

V

Shadow and Mr Nancy started comparing scars after their fourth beers, and they goaded John into joining them.

“Where did you get that?” asked John and pointed at the new, rather nasty scar on Shadow’s side.

“I hung in a tree,” answered Shadow. “What happened to your shoulder?”

“Afghanistan.”

“They are a merciless folk there,” said Mr Nancy sagely, and John got the feeling he was being complimented somehow. “I hear that in the good old days they buried their enemies alive in the sand as an offering to the gods.” He sighed wistfully. “My people never did anything like that.”

Sherlock twirled a glass of red wine in his long fingers, staring at Mr Nancy thoughtfully. “I seem to recall,” he drawled, only a hint of how much of the wine he had drunk audible in his tone, “that your people did much worse.”

Mr Nancy grinned at him. “Variety is the spice of life,” he quipped, and launched into a tale of how he had almost lost his left arm to a boa constrictor once.

 

VI

Shadow sat perched on the windowsill, a sweating can of light beer in hand.

“So,” started John and raised his eyebrows questioningly. “You’re a god.”

The large man nodded.

“What’s it like?”

Shadow made a non-committal shrug. “Tiresome. People tend to demand things of you once they find out you’re a god.”

“Miracles?” John thought of Sherlock and his work.

“Those, too.” Shadow took a large draught of his beer. “You love him.”

The sudden statement threw John off. “Sorry?” he blinked, Shadow’s keen observation making him feel uneasy. “Does it make you uncomfortable?”

Shadow shook his head. “It’s none of my business.”

John nodded. “Do you…?” He hesitated.

“No one,” replied Shadow to the unspoken question. “Not anymore. She died.”

“I’m sorry.” John sipped at his beer. “Do you miss her?”

“No. My Laura is not coming back.”

John didn’t ask about the way Shadow’s free hand clenched into a tight fist, his knuckles paling, before it relaxed again. “Did she ever tell you—what it feels like, loving a god?” he asked instead.

Now Shadow looked faintly amused. “There is no manual to being a god.” He put down the can of beer and began to twirl a coin, a silver quarter dollar, between his fingers. It shone orange, reflecting the light of the streetlamps outside. Shadow flipped the coin over each finger of his left hand and then closed his fist around it. A moment later it was dancing over his right hand.

His left was still closed.

“How did you do that?” asked John.

“An old friend taught it to me,” replied Shadow. “After he died.”

He handed the coin to John who took it, studied it, found it completely ordinary in every aspect. “It’s just a coin,” he huffed eventually, an undercurrent of disappointment in his tone.

“Is it?” Shadow took the coin from him, took it again; and he took the same coin from John four times without once giving it back. “What do you think; can I do the trick because the coin is magical, or because I’m a god?”

John thought about it, followed the glinting pattern of the coin with his eyes. “Or is the coin magical because you’re a god?”

Shadow smiled, dropped the quarter into his can and drained it empty in one go. “I learned it early on,” he told John and got up to fetch another beer from the fridge. “There are no straight answers when you’re dealing with gods.”

“But—Wait!” John frowned when Shadow turned back to him. He felt confused. “Which one is the _right_ one, then?”

The man shrugged. “Which one do you believe in?”

 

VII

The evening had progressed into the small hours of morning when shadows cast by electric light seemed to move on the walls. The sounds of the man and the gods drinking and sharing lurid tales had quieted down.

“You feel left out.”

John started awake from the pleasant doze he had drifted off to. “No! No,” he hurried to deny from where he sat in the corner of the sofa, nursing the remains of his last beer. Sherlock looked at him. “Well, maybe a little. The things you talk about…” He wasn’t sure how to continue.

“You didn’t think we were here only to reminisce and ‘make merry,’ did you?”

John smiled guiltily.

Sighing, Sherlock cast a furtive glance back at the other gods who were playing an odd version of poker at the coffee table. Their cards appeared to be completely blank. “Alliances, John, is what this is all about. Mr Nancy owes me one. Shadow holds a lot of sway over the gods who hail from the Old World.” He paused and thought for a moment. “After what happened, they tend to listen to him, but I don’t know how long that will last. I have to act.”

“After what happened?”

He made a dismissive gesture. “Unimportant now. I need their help to end the thing Moriarty has become.”

John’s eyebrows nearly disappeared into his hair as he tried to comprehend. “Moriarty wasn’t always like that?”

“The further from our origins we are taken, John, the more distorted we become. He was quite different when I first heard of him.”

“He is older than you then.”

“Certainly.” Sherlock took a drink from the golden liquid in his goblet – where had he got it from? John couldn’t recall ever seeing any in the house – and pursed his lips thoughtfully. “It is only a matter of time before I confront him. Shadow and Mr Nancy,” and again his lips formed words John didn’t hear, something with different vowels, and something that ended in a sharp hiss, “have drank my mead. They are obliged to help.”

John nodded, masking his not wholly understanding the explanation with a tired smile. “Will they bring friends, too? Or will it be just the four of us?”

There was sudden sadness in Sherlock’s pale eyes. He reached out to John. “It will be fought in a place you cannot go,” he murmured slowly and grasped John’s wrist with a cool hand, letting the tips of his fingers brush the bruise hidden by the shirtsleeve. “I can’t take you behind the scenes with me.”

“What? Where?”

“You’re human, John. There are places you can’t go because of what you are. Trust me, if I could…” Sherlock let his eyes fall closed and hung his head tiredly. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

The sheer shock of hearing him apologise made John’s stomach feel like he’d swallowed lead. “What am I supposed to do then?”

“Wait,” said Sherlock. “Wait, and see if I return.”

  


Little did they know that the eye of the storm awaited them,

and within it a god called Moriarty.

  


 

 

_They believe. And then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjurations. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales. People imagine, and people believe: and it is that belief, that rock-solid belief, that makes things happen._


End file.
